One of the key elements to educating and training healthcare practitioners is understanding both normal and pathologic anatomy. In the real world, every patient’s anatomy is different, so a surgeon’s practice on human cadavers, animal models and generic mannequins often has little relevance to the actual patient on the table.

Existing training models have significant limitations. Human cadavers are in
short supply, provide a limited pathology range and are rarely matched to the target pathology in training. Plus, they do not retain the responsiveness of living tissue. Animal models are instructive on the principles of surgery (e.g., cutting, suturing, deploying or attaching devices), but do not replicate human anatomy. Both animal and cadaver training models require expensive training and controlled environments. Mannequins are limited to recreating normal or generic anatomy due to the high cost of producing variations and the limitations of tooling used to mass-produce these mannequins. With advancing 3D printing technology, creating realistic examples of human
anatomy is not as time consuming or costly as traditional methods of medical
modeling.

The multi-material hand model incorporates soft tissue with hard bone in a single print.

“The Stratasys J750 can economically produce training mannequins in a wide range of normal and abnormal anatomies, replicating realistic colors and tissue textures, making it possible for surgeons to effectively train on abnormal and patient-specific anatomy.”